"When I pulled up that first chart, we saw 'the knife,' we said, that's certainly algorithmic and that is weird. We continued to refine our software, honing the algorithms we use to find this stuff," Donovan told me. Now that he knows where and how to look, he could spend all day for weeks just picking out these patterns in the market data. The examples that he posts online are just the ones that look the most interesting, but at any given moment, some kind of bot is making moves like this in the stock exchange.
via theatlantic.com
Algorithmic trading is a pretty wild and wooly area. Who would've thought to look at millisecond-level data?